Testing the model of psychological flexibility in the Serbian cultural context: The psychometric properties of the acceptance and action questionnaire

Abstract

The aim of this study was to examine the theoretical model of psychological flexibility proposed by creators of Acceptance and Commitment Therapy. To do this, we investigated the structural and convergent validity of the Acceptance and Action Questionnaire-II, translated into the Serbian language. The study was performed on 1781 Serbian speaking adults. By methods of robust confirmatory factor analysis, two models have been tested. The best fit was achieved with the data-driven model constructed by adding three pairs of correlated residuals to the original hypothesized model of latent structure. This model demonstrated it`s structural invariance across samples divided by gender and by previous experience with services provided by mental health professionals. Excellent convergent validity of the scale was demonstrated through adequate correlations with indicators of subjective well-being, styles of emotional regulation, and coping strategies. Our findings suggest that the Serbian adaptation of the Acceptance and Action Questionnaire-II is a valid and reliable measure of behavioral avoidance, implicating that the construct of psychological flexibility has been demonstrated as conceptually similar to those previously found across various languages and cultural contexts.

The association between psychological inflexibility and mental health during the third wave of COVID-19 pandemic

“…Namely, our study showed that psychological inflexibility could predict levels of distress both directly and indirectly via fatigue and subjective well-being. Our results are in line with the previous studies that showed a connection between psychological inflexibility and higher levels of depression, anxiety, and stress and lower levels of well-being (González-Fernández et al, 2017;Žuljević et al, 2020). Similar results were obtained in Spain (Hernández-Lopez et al, 2021) where it was reported that psychological inflexibility together with mental illness symptoms increased during lockdown.…”

“…On the other hand, psychological inflexibility is often defined as experiential avoidance, i.e., the avoidance of difficult emotions, thoughts, and situations (Dawson & Golijani-Moghaddam, 2020). Previous studies showed that psychological inflexibility was associated with higher levels of depression, anxiety, and stress and negatively correlated with well-being (González-Fernández et al, 2017;Žuljević et al, 2020), and suicidality (Krafft et al, 2019). During the coronavirus pandemic, a study (Hernández-Lopez et al, 2021) found that psychological inflexibility increased during the lockdown in Spain, along with mental illness symptomatology.…”

Being Flexible in Zuckerman’s Alternative Personality Space

“…In addition to demographic questions (self-report biological sex and age), individuals completed the 10-item version of the Acceptance and Action Questionnaire–II (AAQ-II; Bond et al, 2011), which assesses psychological flexibility. The AAQ-II was translated into Serbian by Žuljević et al (2020) and adapted to the Bosnian and Herzegovinian culture by Krnetić and Vujaković (2021) who report that the translated scale has good psychometric characteristics. Participants respond to items using a 7-point Likert scale from 1 = not at all true to 7 = completely true (example item, “My painful experiences and memories make it difficult to live a life that I would value”).…”

The Impact of Baseline Mindfulness Scores on Mindfulness-Based Intervention Outcomes: Toward Personalized Mental Health Interventions

“…A higher AAQ-II total score indicates a higher level of experiential avoidance. The AAQ-II has been shown to have a unifactorial internal structure (Bond et al, 2011) and has been satisfactorily adapted to multiple cultural contexts and populations [e.g., Greece (Karekla and Michaelides, 2017), Malaysia (Shari et al, 2019), Turkey (Yavuz et al, 2016), China (Zhang et al, 2014), Serbia (Zuljevic et al, 2020)]. In this study, we used the Spanish version of the AAQ-II (Ruiz et al, 2013).…”